Goalscape

Here is an interesting story from Rick Perkins about how he is using Goalscape to manage his latest charity project.

Goalscaping For Charity: Raising £2,000 for Action Medical Research by Cycling from Land’s End to John O’Groat’s

Rick Perkins recently signed up to cycle the length of Britain in aid of Action Medical Research, a marvelous charity dedicated to improving the health of babies and children in the UK.

For nearly 60 years Action Medical Research has been behind numerous breakthroughs including the UK polio vaccine and ultrasound scanning in pregnancy. More recently it developed the fetal heart rate monitor: a new state-of-the-art device that could save thousands of at-risk babies by identifying potential problems much earlier than has previously been possible.

The route for the ride is from Land’s End at the tip of Cornwall in the South West of England to John O’Groats, the northernmost point of the Scottish mainland. The distance is 1,000 miles, to be covered in just 9 days.

This presented a 3-fold challenge:

1. Find ways to raise the required £2,000 in sponsorship
2. Sort out the logistics: sourcing equipment and planning for the event
3. Do enough training to be able to complete the course.

So Rick had a lot to do before he could get on his bike in Land’s End! Fortunately he has a lot of experience in projects of different kinds, so he knew that investing a bit of time in organisation and planning would pay dividends later on. Rick uses Goalscape for his work and his other sporting activities, so his first step was to goalscape this new endeavour.

The Goalscape chart in the screenshot below shows Rick’s opening project plan. This is a charity event and the main goal is to Raise £2,000 for Action Medical Research through sponsorship. So although physical training is going to be a very significant element, the initial focus is on the fund raising work. Rick is reasonably fit and does a lot of cycling anyway, so he knew that at the start he could spend a lot of time chasing sponsorship, as long as he did enough ‘maintenance’ work on his fitness.

Rick’s first step was to use Goalscape to identify the different groups of people he needs to communicate with and plan exactly how to do that. As he did this planning he also jotted down some goals in other areas, along with any other ideas that occurred to him: he knew that he could come back later to make detailed plans for achieving those other goals.

As the project developed and he is starting to hit some of his early targets, he is updating his goalscape: ticking off completed goals, adding new ones and adjusting the relative importances as his priorities change.

Starting with his initial setup, Rick has added a new goal for Equipment and a few more subgoals in other areas. He has also started to make detailed plans for his training programme and is filling in the progress he has already made in all his goals.

Right now Rick is doing quite well in his Fund raising and Communications goals and he is starting to build up his training mileage. He has also put some more thought into the Event itself, planning what he needs and organising how to transport everything.

He is not finished yet though: the ride itself is not until May 2011 and there is a lot to do before Rick gets on his bike at Land’s End. As his project goes on, he will be updating his goalscape and sharing it on his website and on Facebook so his friends and sponsors can follow his progress, exchange messages and tell all their friends about it.

Rick says “I use Goalscape in my private and business life and it is the ideal tool to help me tackle this challenge. There are so many parts to it and such a lot to do! I need to have a proper plan so I can see everything I need to do, decide what to do next and make everything run as smoothly as possible. In the build-up to the event I will be spending more and more time on the road, so I am using Goalscape to make sure I do all my fundraising, logistics and admin work as early as possible.

“As I continue to work my way through it I can keep adjusting the goalscape to accommodate my shifting focus and refine my detailed plans. I am putting screenshots on my website and Facebook page so everyone can see what I am up to – they can even suggest things I may have missed!”

Follow Rick’s progress by joining his Facebook Page, Twitter Feed or Blog via http://www.lejog4amr.co.uk/

Sponsor Rick via the Action Medical Research Page: http://www.action.org.uk/sponsor/rickperkins

We have been using Goalscape for our own presentations since we first started to build it; and quite a few of our recent updates have enhanced this aspect.

Now Marcus Baur has made a short video that shows how you can use Goalscape to build rich, engaging presentations (with less effort!) – and use the same model to plan the follow-up actions. Marcus also illustrates some of the cool features you can use when delivering your presentation and interacting with your audience.

Goalscape Desktop version 2.1.1253.513

We have issued this second set of updates this month because we have finished some extra features and enhancements early! The two really big items are the new ‘Presentation Mode’ and much smarter Attachments handling.

Here are a couple of short videos that summarise the key changes and demonstrate how the new features work:

Presentation mode

This screenshot illustrates the new ‘fullscreen’ view with the menu bars stripped out and a pared-down panel, showing only the goal name, notes and attachments. It also shows the new Attachments display and image preview.

You can access Presentation Mode using the new View option in the OS menu bar (click the ‘X’ top right or press ‘Esc’ to revert to the standard mode).

Attachments
The Attachments tab now displays attached files as icons. For image files a preview appears on mouseover and there are different options to show the image, including fullscreen.

To indicate the presence of attachments on a goal, an asterisk appears next to the paper clip icon in the tab.

AIR 2.0 (currently in beta) offers further improvements here – particularly the facility to open attachments directly in their native applications rather than through your browser. If you do not want to wait until AIR 2.0 goes on public release, you can download the beta version here (check the License Agreement box and download Adobe AIR 2 Runtime).

HTML reports
HTML reports now include details of any attachments present (with live links) and text in user-defined fields.

Bug fixes
There were a few, er, “interesting” bugs that needed fixing urgently! The most obvious was the issue with the German ‘Get started with Goalscape’ template that caused an exception on starting Goalscape. There was also a problem opening old goalscapes that had goals with very small Importance.

There are a few more fixes and a couple of minor tweaks to the look and feel. As always you can find a full listing in the Release Notes.

Goalscape Online beta test
We already have a basic alpha version running and we are putting it through its paces right now. Many of you have already signed up for the beta test: this is still open and you can sign up on this forum thread.

Goalscape Affiliate Program
Lots of people have also joined our affiliate program: if any more of you want to earn rewards by helping us to spread the word about Goalscape you can sign up here.